


No Gravity, No Fallen Angels

by Netgirl_y2k



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Angels & Demons, Female Friendship, Gen, Wings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-07
Updated: 2014-06-07
Packaged: 2018-02-03 19:33:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1755301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Netgirl_y2k/pseuds/Netgirl_y2k
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The quarterly balancing of the books between good and evil, between heaven and hell.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Gravity, No Fallen Angels

Morgana was waiting in the Starbucks when Gwen arrived; she was smoking a cigarette and drinking scotch from a mug.

The former queen of hell looked up at Gwen through heavily made up eyes. She smirked around her cigarette and said, “Guinevere.”

Gwen let her heavy travel bag thunk down on Morgana’s foot. She had just finished a nine hour flight from New York, and wasn’t feeling particularly angelic. “You can’t smoke in here,” she said. “And it’s Gwen down here, you know that.”

"That’s an ugly cardigan, _Gwen_ ,” said Morgana.

Gwen rolled her eyes, and refrained from commenting on Morgana’s own aging Goth look. “I’m going to get a coffee, do you want one?”

Morgana shook her head and tipped her mug of scotch at Gwen.

*

These meetings took place once every twenty-five years. It was a quarterly balancing of the books between good and evil; between heaven and hell.

They usually met in purgatory. This quarter they were meeting in the Starbucks in Heathrow airport; in retrospect purgatory had a lot going for it.

As she waited in line for her cappuccino, Gwen watched Morgana as the fallen angel ground out her cigarette, produced a flask from her pocket, and poured another splash of scotch into her mug.

Morgana le Fay, who had once been a warrior of heaven and Gwen’s friend, before she had taken the advice that it was _better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven_ literally.

Morgana hadn’t reigned anywhere for centuries. She lived amongst humans and _consulted_ for hell.

That had been her last great gift to the human world, management consultants; Gwen had given them labradoodles as an apology.

*

Gwen set her coffee down.

Morgana slouched in her seat; Gwen sat very straight. She had no wings in this world, not unless she wished it so, but she still sat as though she had feathers to ruffle.

"Did you have a good flight?" Morgana asked. "Nobody at passport control noticed the flowers sprouting at your feet or the songbirds chirping around your head?"

"This place is concrete for a mile in every direction," said Gwen, scowling. "And there’s this thing called birdstrike, apparently."

Morgana actually laughed at that, and produced a laptop from under the table. “Shall we get on with this, then?”

She looked enviously at Gwen’s MacBook, and off Gwen’s questioning look said, “Company loyalty. Windows is one of ours; we were particularly proud of XP.”

For the next half hour or so the angel and the former queen of hell looked like nothing so much as a pair of human travellers, squeezing in a meeting between connecting flights, as they compared spreadsheets and graphs.

It occurred to Gwen that it wasn’t just the former queen who was diminished - they all were; small acts of misery and evil were balanced by small acts of charity and kindness.

That didn’t bother Gwen; she had always believed that small acts of goodness, in the right place, at the right time, could change the world.

"Well," said Morgana as they finished up, "see you in twenty-five years."

"Um," said Gwen. "I’m actually thinking of staying down here for a while."

Morgana scowled, and looked as though she was about to demand to know _why?_ Gwen didn’t really have an answer, except that somebody should. They claimed to know what was best for the humans, and yet spent no time among them. Arthur hadn’t been down since the last time he’d been called upon to smite evildoers with his flaming sword.

The fallen angel snorted, blowing a curl of black hair away from her face. “Here, or back in the New World?”

"London," said Gwen. Although that was largely because she couldn’t face getting on another plane.

She had always considered herself to be one of the more forward thinking angels, but if the humans had been meant to fly, they would have been given wings in the first place.

Morgana produced a pen from her pocket - ironic, considering that fake pockets on women's clothes had been one of her more recent contributions to human civilisation. She took Gwen’s hand - Gwen shuddered at her touch - and scrawled a sequence of numbers on Gwen’s palm.

"Only call if something’s on fire," she said.

*

Nothing was on fire.

The human realm was small, and this one city was _tiny_. And there was something about Morgana’s proximity - a black hole of emptiness and misery that called to Gwen even as it repulsed her.

Morgana must have felt similarly because when Gwen called to ask if she wanted to get a coffee sometime, there was only the briefest of pauses before Morgana said, “Yes, okay.”

"Why did you leave?" Gwen asked. This time they weren’t in a Starbucks, at least.

Morgana’s eyes’s narrowed and her chapped lips pursed. “I mean—” said Gwen, before Morgana could rip open old wounds, wounds that had scabbed over but never healed “—why did you leave hell?”

Morgana shrugged. “It’s changed; it’s all run by committees these days.”

"Sounds awful," said Gwen with mock sympathy.

"Hellish," Morgana replied, deadpan. Gwen surprised them both by actually laughing.

*

The second time it was Morgana who called Gwen, to suggest a stronger drink than coffee.

Morgana swirled the merlot around the bottom of her glass and said, “Wine was one of mine, you know.”

"Gwaine says it was one of his."

Morgana clicked her tongue and said, “Think about it; cumulatively wine has done much more evil in the world than good.”

"That doesn’t stop you from drinking it, I notice."

"Fruits of my labour, Guinevere," said Morgana, raising her glass in a half-hearted toast.

*

Gwen always felt her best close to growing things. She took a walk in Richmond Park. Morgana tagged along wearing an oversized black overcoat, and what had promised to be a beautiful day turned overcast and drizzly.

"Do you miss it?" Morgana asked with affected disinterest, meaning… _up there._

"Sometimes," answered Gwen. "But I’ve never lived in the human world for so long; it’s much more… _more_ than I thought it would be. I wish I could convince Arthur to come down for a time.”

"How is he?" Morgana asked. Her voice was strained, unsurprisingly. She and Arthur had been as close as brother and sister once; the golden angel and the dark, with their matching flaming swords; the justice and wrath of heaven.

But that had been before Morgana’s treachery and fall.

"Arthur is… much as he has always been. He misses the days of smiting." 

Morgana smirked. “Don’t we all.”

"Merlin is—" That was as far as Gwen got before Morgana froze, darkness flickering around her like static. The wind picked up, blowing Morgana’s coat back like her dark wings of old. There were a herd of red deer in the park, and a stag stared evilly at Gwen.

Morgana shook herself; the darkness receded slightly, the wind dropped, and the stag went back to cropping grass. “I’ve seen Merlin,” she said shortly.

"What? When?" It is only recently ( _recent_ from the perspective of the functionally immortal) that contact with Morgana was no longer punishable with exile. “What happened?”

"You know that big fault line they’ve got in the New World?"

"The San Andreas Fault, the one in California, you mean?" Gwen asked.

“ _That_ happened.”

*

Gwen was a little buzzed on the atmosphere in the bar. The girl serving the drinks was in the first flush of love; a man had just spilled a stranger’s pint, and his offer to replace it was going to be the beginning of a thirty year friendship; a woman toying with her tonic water was about to tell her husband that she was pregnant with what was to be the first of three very much loved children.

As such she almost didn’t hear Morgana say, “Do you know why I didn’t kill Merlin at San Andreas?”

Because you couldn’t, Gwen thought, not even when you were a queen and had the massed ranks of hell at your back.

"He used to be your friend?" she said instead.

"He’s too valuable downstairs. A fallen angel who doesn’t even know he’s fallen… he’s their biggest windfall since, well, me."

Gwen elected to ignore her. Morgana had a forked tongue; she was a demon, it was in her nature to lie.

*

Gwen wasn’t exiled; she could go home at any time.

She didn’t have to stay in her flat with its tiny rooftop herb garden. She didn’t have to drink coffee, and red wine, and take long walks with the former queen of hell as though they were both human, as though they were friends.

She didn’t have to listen to Morgana’s twisted version of the truth.

Still, when Morgana called and asked Gwen out for a drink it didn’t really occur to her to say no.

They were walking back from the bar when they passed two men kissing, happily oblivious to everything in the world except each other.

Moragna scowled and twitched her fingers; the sky opened with a torrential downpour. Gwen looked over her shoulder and grinned to see that the two lovers barely seemed to have noticed. With a wave of her hand she ensured that they would hail a taxi easily, and find an umbrella left behind by the last passenger inside.

"This is me," said Morgana. "Come up for a coffee until the rain goes off."

"You’re _making_ it rain,” grumbled Gwen, but followed her anyway.

Morgana’s flat overlooked the financial district; a fitting altar for a fallen angel, Gwen supposed. It was more cluttered than Gwen would have expected, but Morgana had lived among the humans for a long time.

In something of an insult to subtlety, Morgana kept a boa constrictor in a terrarium.

Morgana shucked off her overlarge coat; her hair was piled up on her head, and the dress she wore was cut low in the back. Gwen could see the two scars, still an angry red after all this time, over her shoulder blades.

Gwen breathed in audibly.

"You’d forgotten?" Morgana asked, without turning around.

"No, I—" It would have been difficult to forget. Arthur hadn’t been able to bring himself to do it, so Merlin had been the one to hack off Morgana’s great black wings with Morgana’s own sword, before casting her out. "I just hadn’t thought about it in along time."

"Lucky you," said Morgana. "Can I—" she had turned to face Gwen, and her voice was as meek as Gwen had ever heard it. "Can I see yours?"

Gwen hesitated.

"Please. I won’t try to touch you. I just— it’s been so long."

It didn’t take much for Gwen to call her wings into existence in the human realm. Fully spread her great white wings brushed the walls of Morgana’s flat, knocking over a pile of books and a lamp.

Morgana crept closer and reached out. She was true to her word, though, and stopped short of touching Gwen’s feathers.

"I’m not sorry," she whispered, "I’m _not_.” Morgana fell to her knees, wracked with sobs. “I’m not sorry, I’m not sorry, I’m not…”

Gwen sank down into a crouch, and, careful not to touch Morgana, encircled her with her wings.

There she waited while the fallen angel and former queen of hell cried her heart out.


End file.
